Nerves
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Kimball is wounded protecting Carolina in a firefight. Carolina is not exactly well-equipped to handle this situation.


"You can't do this kind of thing," Carolina says. She is, somehow, crouching at attention, quiet disapproval radiating from every line of her armor.

Vanessa pats her on the shoulder, or, well, reaches up and sort of shoves at her. Her fine motor skills are a little out of sync right now. "As you're so fond of telling me whenever I find out you've gotten yourself hurt doing something needlessly heroic: That's not really up to you."

Carolina's helmet shifts a bit in the sequence of small, jerky motions that Vanessa has learned to recognize as a concealed eye-roll; she grabs Vanessa's hand and places it firmly back at her side. "Believe me, I appreciate the irony of the situation."

"Is it really ironic, though?" Vanessa asks. "I mean, nobody ever gets that right. Is it just poetic justice? Isn't it–" Another tremor jolts through her body, and for a moment it's all she can do to keep breathing as her muscles lock into painful activation. Distantly, she hears Carolina yell for a medic over the radio. It's the tenth time she's called for one, and Vanessa's not really sure what she hopes to accomplish at this point, but if nothing else the edge in her voice is a pretty good litmus test of how worried she's getting.

This time, it takes her a little longer to snap out of it, and when she does, gasping for breath, Carolina's grip on her shoulder is almost painful enough to block out the ache in her muscles. "Vanessa," she says, "are you with me?"

"Why couldn't they have used one of those nice-and-painless disintegrator weapons?" Vanessa grumbles, and regrets the joke instantly at the way Carolina's helmet twitches back. "I'm fine," she says. "Look, it happens. I've had medics warn me about this possibility for years. It's almost a relief to know exactly how bad it'll be."

Carolina curses, and, supporting her head, rolls Vanessa carefully onto her side. "You're bleeding again. You're sure I can't apply biofoam?"

"Not unless you want to mess with the implants even more," Vanessa says, then pauses, considering. "Which might be an option if it comes down to it. Better to spend a couple months recovering from spinal surgery than to bleed to death from a damn _graze_."

"It's a little deeper than a graze," Carolina grumbles, but reapplies the conventional bandage, flinching the first time Vanessa grimaces in pain. Vanessa regrets letting Carolina yank off her helmet, tries not to show any further reaction. Carolina flinches anyway. "I've seen nervous-system implants similar to this before, but nothing this primitive. Field medicine?"

"Frontier medicine," Vanessa says, gratefully recognizing the line of questioning as a distraction tactic. "Outer-edge colonies don't exactly get the latest in medical technology. What we do get is weird illnesses that kill off most of your peripheral nervous system. Lucky us. I was seven when I got sick." She tries a shrug that turns into a shudder. Carolina's glower penetrates even through her helmet, and Vanessa sighs and obediently lies still. "The implants work fine. I haven't had any symptoms for years. That bullet just happened to catch me in the wrong place, is all."

"Any place is the wrong place for a bullet," Carolina says. "Especially the spine. And especially for you. You shouldn't have been out there in the first place."

"Someone needed to draw their fire while you snuck around behind. We were radio-silent, you weren't expecting them and would've been caught off-guard. You took out a little group of Charon's soldiers, you got the data, I'm alive, everything's fine. If I hadn't moved, you would've been hurt or killed. I don't know if you noticed, but it's not like there was anyone else for miles who could've helped."

"They have _disintegration weapons_ ," Carolina says, slowly and carefully. "In this situation, you're not drawing fire, you're drawing something that'll shred you to pieces and keep me from yelling at you for it."

"They didn't have the disintegration guns."

"They could have."

"But they didn't," Vanessa says. "I'm going to be okay. You understand that, right? You believe me?"

Carolina hesitates a moment too long. Vanessa reaches clumsily for her hand, gives it a reassuring squeeze. Carolina says, "Ow."

"Sorry," Vanessa says, relaxing what she belatedly realizes is an armor-enhanced death-grip.

" _Ow_." Carolina shakes her hand out, staring at Vanessa in a way that somehow communicates betrayal through her helmet.

"See, what I did there is I tried to offer emotional support and intimacy through physical touch–"

"I think you broke something in my hand."

"–and what I think happened is that a muscle or two may have slightly misfired–"

"You _crushed my hand_."

"–the end result being that I may have possibly crushed your hand, yes."

Carolina stares at her, then shakes her head, still flexing her fingers. "Okay," she says. "Okay, yes, I believe you. You're gonna be fine."

"You've got a really reassuring bedside manner, anyone ever tell you that?" Vanessa says. "Hey, what's the ETA on that medic?"

"Three minutes."

"Damn. This one isn't gonna be pretty."

This time, she passes out somewhere around the stage where her muscles decide that, instead of all the tight clenching, it might be more fun to start convulsing in a more random and unpredictable way. She wakes up what feels like moments later, cold and sick with exhaustion, lying on a gurney in what must be an evac shuttle. She tastes blood in her mouth, but there aren't any medics around, which means she must be stable.

Carolina, from somewhere beside her, says, "You bit your tongue." When Vanessa finally manages to tilt her head, she's not at all surprised to see Carolina slumped next to her in a jumpseat, helmet off. She looks like death warmed over. "You keep scaring the hell out of me today."

"It's actually a little nice to be returning the favor for once," Vanessa says, but regrets the teasing tone in her voice when Carolina buries her face in her hands, rubbing at her eyes. "Look, I'm okay. You're okay. We'll call this one a win."

"You can't do things like this," Carolina says, her voice muffled by her hands. "I don't think you're hearing me when I say that. You're too important."

Vanessa bristles. "My life isn't worth more than someone else's."

Carolina lowers her hands and makes an abortive little move against the restraints of her jumpseat, like she's trying to lean forward. "It is," she says. "You have to understand that. You're the only thing keeping the wheels turning right now. Those kids are moving forward because they believe in you."

"If that's the case, then I'm just as good to them as a martyr," Vanessa says. "If it comes to that."

Carolina slumps back in her chair, a mock-casual motion that still communicates frustration. "To me, then. You're more important to me." Her voice cracks a little at the end, and the fingers of one hand twitch like she's thinking about physically dragging the words back.

A pause, while they both mull that over. Vanessa says, "I don't think that makes me feel any better."

Carolina snorts. "I know for a fact that it makes _me_ feel worse right now. I wish I didn't care so much about–" She stops herself short of finishing that thought.

Vanessa says, "Yeah, well," and thinks that, right when the bullet hit, she wouldn't have been kidding when she'd wished for disintegration instead. "I think that's kinda how this thing works. It hurts, sometimes."

"All the time," Carolina says, with a wry smile.

"Oh yeah," says Vanessa. "How's the hand?"

"Six broken bones."

"Seriously?"

A scowl. "One hairline fracture."

"I can live with that."

"I can't express what a relief that is."

Vanessa stops herself short of sticking out her tongue, mostly because in its present bloodied state it would probably send a harsher message than intended. "So here's where we're at: I acted, and we're both alive as a direct result. We're both okay. I don't regret it." Carolina opens her mouth to protest, so Vanessa adds, "And neither did you when you caught a bullet for me last month."

Carolina closes her mouth with a snap, stares at the ceiling of the evac shuttle. "Not for no reason," she says, at last. "I can promise that. Never for no reason."

"Deal," says Vanessa, and smiles at Carolina's expression. "It's awful, isn't it?"

"You're enjoying this way too much."

"Turnabout."

"Oh, shut up and get some rest," Carolina says. But she pushes her restraints up and over her head for a moment, crouches closer to press her lips against Vanessa's forehead.

Vanessa sighs, sleepily. "Kinda worth it, though?"

"Yeah," Carolina says, breath warm against her skin. "Not for no reason. Never for no reason."


End file.
